The Second-Best Selling Author in the Family

Last Friday my son's first-grade teacher did a pretty awesome thing.

She threw a book launch party for her students, to celebrate the book they wrote and she published.

All the parents (and some brothers & sisters) showed up, the kids all got "so-and-so is a published author" certificates, there were lots of shiny balloons, and there was even a little charcuterie board.

Each student wrote and illustrated one page about an animal that lives in the jungle. There was some bonus content too, of course - each student also had a packet of drafts, research, and sketches for their page. 

The best part was seeing how proud all the kids were. My son woke up Friday morning, and the first thing he said after jumping up out of bed was, "Today's the day of my publishing party!"

It's a great book. It's fun to not be the only published author in the family anymore. 

And now that I've sent the link out to friends and family, he'll probably outpace me in royalties in a couple of days. 

How's That Resolution Going?

 

Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I posted a few goals for 2025 on Bluesky and Twitter as 2024 came to an end the other day, and I wanted to put them out into the universe here too. 

The biggest one is publishing THE FIRST KID ON MARS with Big Sea Books. This is the story that brought me back to writing for the first time since I was a kid, and it's the story that my kid fell in love with as I was writing it. I'll be editing/revising this spring, and the plan is to publish it by the end of the school year. 

I've only been able to write a little bit of SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN in the present so far - the rest exists only in my imagined future. I'm planning to catch up to that future this year, with a full first draft complete before the calendar flips again.

With three published short stories (BLUE SKIES and FROM NOW ON in The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, respectively, and DAY TEN in the first issue of Bunker Squirrel Magazine), I'm starting to feel like a real writer. I've got two more ready to publish this year (BLIND LUCK and (almost) out of the woods), and a whole bunch more in the works. How many can I get published this year?

Speaking of Bunker Squirrel Magazine, I'm planning to submit a flash fiction piece based on their prompts every month. You should too - it's run by great people, and it's putting some great writing out into the world. 

I want to write more haiku this year. Lots and lots and lots of haiku. I gave my parents a @haikuformykids calendar, and maybe it's time to start selling them somewhere. 

And finally, I want to blog more regularly. I guess I can check that off my list.

For today, anyway.

Summer Mode

Summer, I posted the other day, has begun.

Since I was a little kid, I've spent at least some time visiting family in Maine every summer. Now that I've got little kids of my own, I'm grateful that I get to bring them to this magical place. In the spring of 2020, we packed up the car and came out here for what turned out to be a four-month respite; a small town on the coast of Maine was a much better way for two young kids to endure a worldwide pandemic than our crowded Chicago neighborhood. 

That was a strange spring, and it was a wonderful summer.

It was also a reminder that we could do this every year. My wife and I are both teachers (my parents were teachers, too, and it still seems strange to me that normal people have to work in the summer), and this seemed like a lot more fun than the summer teaching gigs we'd pick up in the Before Times.

This year we stayed in Chicago for a few weeks after the school year ended to see friends and enjoy summer in the city. It was fun--Chicago is a fantastic summer town, packed with block parties, movies in the parks, and beautiful beaches--but it didn't really feel like summer to me. 

We left on Canada Day, coincidentally camping in Canada that night so we could spend a day at Niagara Falls (10/10 by the way, I should write a bit about that amazingness) before arriving at my forever summer home. It just feels right here, you know?

The first morning, we took the canoe across the Creek (we call it the Creek, but it's a lot more impressive than that makes it sound--it's actually a branch of the Kennebec River, a few hundred yards upstream of where it feeds into the Atlantic Ocean) to a magical sand bar beach that only appears at low tide.

We have a routine there: we all get out on the pristine sand, I haul the canoe up far enough that the rising tide won't take it before it's time to go home, and we spend a few hours playing in the gentle waves. If we get the timing right, small islands appear briefly as the water rises; I wrote one of my favorite haiku about that moment a few years ago.

Now it feels like summer. 

Don't Judge a Book by Its--Actually, Go Ahead

I may have pantsed my way into a cover reveal on Twitter yesterday. 

Let me explain.

I started playing with ideas for the cover of THE FIRST KID ON MARS a few days ago. I'm not an illustrator, but I figured I could find my way around Canva well enough to put something together. 

After a few days, I finally created something that expressed the idea in my head: a teddy bear sitting on the surface of the red planet. It wasn't really very good, but I didn't hate it. 

So I posted it on Twitter, thinking I'd get some feedback on the concept that might help me figure out how to move forward. 

I never could have expected what happened next. 

A complete stranger, who happens to be an illustrator in Germany, saw my post and the comments and replied:

I got inspired by your concept and had a little fun as a daily challenge. 😊
It's yours if you like it.

I do like it. I like it a lot. I need to give it some thought and figure out some logistical things, but I think we may have just accidentally revealed the cover of my first book. 

What do you think?

 

 

 

Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est? (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Serial Killer)

I didn't plan to become a serial killer; it just kind of happened.

Hang on, I should probably back up a little bit here. And, before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I have not killed anyone and I don't think I ever will. Sure, like most writers, I have a questionable internet search history, but that just comes with the territory, right?

Right?

Anyway. 

As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite things about Twitter (or the platform formerly known as Twitter, if you insist) is the use of prompts that get me thinking and writing. I spent many years of my life not writing any fiction at all, and when I started again there were some old muscles that hadn't stretched in a long time. And so I stretched, grateful for the exercise. 

I stretched my way into my first published short story, an opportunity that grew from responding to daily #TimeTravelAuthors posts. I'm working on a sequel that tells the same story from a different character's point of view; those muscles are getting stronger and more confident.

This past winter I found #CreativityStir prompts, daily inspiration for stories, poems, or wherever the photo may lead you. The images were interesting, and the community in the comments welcomed me immediately. And if the first few months hadn't been lovely pictures of things like doves and castles and a guy walking in the woods, I probably wouldn't be where I am today. 

Last month the prompts turned spooky, with supernatural pictures (and now video clips) to inspire us all. I came up with a couple of fun ghost stories, but I didn't have time to participate every day. I knew I'd have more time for mental workouts in August, and I looked forward to finding out what the next theme would be.

And then at the end of July, the announcement came: August would be Serial Killer Month.

Well, friends, I had to think about that. You see, I've been hard at work for two years now on a middle-grade science-fiction epic ten-book series that I'm convinced will be the biggest thing since that kid discovered he was a wizard, and I think I'm supposed to think about my image as a middle-grade author. Or at least not confuse the marketing team for my future bestsellers by writing in a wide range of genres. 

So I had to ask myself: should I stretch my writing muscles with some dark, definitely not middle-grade story ideas? Or should I sit out this month to protect my image?

I decided to stretch, a little tentatively at first. Other writers in the group encouraged me, and one in particular gave me permission to be someone else for the month: #NatTheRipper. 

So now I spend a few minutes each morning sipping coffee and trying to put myself in the head of a killer. Usually the rest of my family is getting ready for today's summer vacation adventure while I'm doing this; sometimes I write on my phone while we walk on the beach, and they don't suspect a thing. 

I'm really glad I found this group - all of the writers are brilliant and the conversations are hilarious. We've all stretched in ways that we didn't expect, and created worlds and characters that never would have existed without these prompts. 

Oh, that picture of the guy walking in the woods I mentioned earlier? That turned into a short story that I think will be published in an anthology of stories inspired by these prompts soon, and that one stretched to some very weird places. More on that later. 

I don't think I'm going to be a thriller writer, but it's fun to stretch in that direction, and it feels good to strengthen those muscles. Maybe under a pen name...

Location, Location, Location

 When I was a kid, I had a big backyard. Maybe not the biggest, but there was room for a football game plus a basketball court, sandbox, playset, and a little stream that would freeze in the winter so you could go ice skating. Behind the yard, and going on forever as far as I could tell, there were thick woods filled with trails and secret treehouses. For a kid growing up just outside of Detroit, it was heaven.

For a young writer (and voracious reader) it was more than that: it offered a never-ending choice of perfect spots to hide with a good book, a notebook, and a pencil until mom's voice found its way through the branches to beckon me home with the promise of lunch or dinner or bedtime. I remember one spot in particular that I loved, and to this day I still believe I did my best writing there.

Thinking back on it now, I'm sure the tree was no more than fifteen feet high, but in my memory it's at least a hundred, and I would climb up to the very top with my writing tools and brilliant ideas. There were a couple of thick branches that bent perfectly around each other to create a seat, complete with places to tuck my feet to make sure I didn't fall while I wrote. 

I don't know how often I really sat up there to write, or for how long, or even what stories I wrote up there. It's possible my recollection is colored by the warm sepia-toned filter of nostalgia; I think I stayed up there all day most days, and I think I wrote the greatest short stories and poetry the world had ever seen.

If any of that is true, I'm giving all credit to the greatest writing spot in the world. 

Since I started writing again, I hadn't given much thought to where I was writing. We have an office in our home that didn't get much use until the pandemic made me a virtual teacher, playing drama games with faces on a screen in an empty room. I slowly started to claim the desk there as a writing space, and suddenly it started to look like this:

No branches, no view, nowhere to tuck my feet. 

I didn't think much of it, and I got some good writing done in that mess. A few months later, we took the family on a summer road trip, and I found new writing spots:

Right now I'm sitting on a screened-in deck overlooking a thick forest on a hill that slopes down to what we call "the creek" here on the coast of Maine - really it's a narrow tributary of the Kennebec River just before it joins the Atlantic Ocean.

 

I've got a chair, and I don't need to hook my feet around anything to keep my balance, but the view is everything I remember. It's a spot that makes it easy to feel like a kid again, inspired to write the greatest stories in the world. 

In fact, I should get back to that now.